Modern Wisdom - #255 - Rory Sutherland - The Psychology Of Irrationality

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising and an author. 2020 is the year of change. Human behaviour is far less rational and sophisticated than we might claim. Combine these two and you have the ideal breeding ground for a Rory episode. Expect to learn what Rory thinks about my new Bear or Bull game, his opinions TikTok and OnlyFans, why sticking your genitals in a Dyson AirBlade is a bad idea, how Rory would advise Boris, why credit card numbers are ridiculous and much more... Sponsor: Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://apple.co/36nNALG (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Alchemy - https://amzn.to/2KQHxXH  Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello my friends, get ready for this one. It's been nearly two years since Rory was on the show and I've wanted to get him back on ever since. This episode does not disappoint, it's absolutely phenomenal. This man is a complete force of nature. The episode just begins, there's no intro, there's no messing around. And it also just ends because we ran over massively and made Rory late for his next meeting, so first off, thank you for coming on Rory you are, you're just phenomenal, I absolutely adore every time we get to sit down. 2020's been the year of change, and human behaviour is far less rational and sophisticated

than we might claim, if you combine these two together you have the ideal breeding ground for a Rory episode. So today, expect to learn what Rory thinks about my new bearer bull game, his opinions on TikTok and only fans, while sticking your genitals in a dice and airblade is a bad idea, how Rory would advise Boris, why credit card numbers are ridiculous and much more. This is the sort of episode you need to listen to literally three or four times. If you enjoy it, please share it with a friend. Nothing would make me happier than for this show to continue to grow so that I can access more and more fantastic and fascinating humans and continue to deliver

them directly into your ears. But for now, it's time for the force of nature that is Rory Sutherland. What do you think of TikTok? It's a thing. I don't fully understand. There are certain things I always get confused because I generally try and make an effort to understand most things. And I don't find it that hard to understand things that other people find baffling, right? Trump voting. And I always argue very simply about Trump voting, okay? Looking at it like this, okay?

Imagine you work for a company and you can choose between two bosses, one of whom is slightly uncomponed, borderline alcoholics, say, but really likes you. And another person who's highly confident and technocratic, but you suspect secretly despises you, okay? You're going to vote for the first guy, okay? Simple as that. Now, that's absolutely incomprehensible to people in the technocratic elite, because they've always had, you know, since, I don't know, Clinton, they've had highly academic kind of

technocratic Ivy League professors, who they see as essentially one of them. So the whole behavior is incomprehensible. TikTok, to me it makes totally perfect sense. There are a few things I find hard to understand. TikTok, I think I understand. It's essentially video Twitters, and I mean, you know, but the music aspect of it, I think,

is really, really interesting, because everybody I think wants to make a music video of their own life, and by making it really easy and manageable. So it's always interesting to look at things like Twitter and TikTok through the lens of choice reduction or Facebook for that matter. In that my space gave you too much choice. And people felt, okay, I've got too much control over length of content, style of content. I'm not a graphic designer. My pages get to end up looking like shit, and then Facebook comes along and basically imposes some sort of aesthetic constraint on you.

So there's a limit to the number of variables you have to agonize over. And Twitter, I doubtfully did that. Facebook did it relative to my space. And I think TikTok does that in a different form by enabling music, but in a way that you can't cock up. So I think there's something going on there. A very interesting exercise in choice reduction, by the way. Go online and try and buy a Jaguar eye pace and compare it to the choice architecture for

the Ford Macke, the Mustang Mackey, or the Tesla. Now interestingly, for products that are designed to be bought online, you don't want a huge amount of customization. Why? Because this is a bit like the paradox of choice. It is the paradox of choice. Conventional logic says that the more choice you have, the greater the chance you have of optimizing your own utility, your own expected utility, therefore the happier you should be. Actually, if you give people too many customization options, they would almost end up, almost certainly end up being unhappy with an element of their choice. So the Jaguar one, for example, I went in and just as an exercise, I choice. So the Jaguar one, for example,

I went in and just as an exercise, I put it in the top of the range-based model. And then three pages later, I found myself asked the question, well, I wanted to pay £190 for fog lamps. And I kind of went, I'm paying £70,000 for a car, I'm not going to fucking pay in, you know, 100 and the price of the fog lamps was in material. It was the fact that I was being made to pay for them. And eventually I became so resentful at the level of kind of addition. Now, if you go through the Tesla or the Ford process,

it's basically five colors, two kinds of wheels, two drive trains. You know, I think with a Tesla, you can pay a thousand for the extra interior. With a model Y, I think you pair a bit extra if you want the third row of seats. Well fair enough, it's a degree of complexity. I'm not grumbling about that. But the extent to which the choice is enough to make you feel you're actually getting what you want and not paying for things you don't want. But at the same time, it's manageable enough that you

can actually go through it in a sequential process without feeling some sense of sort of seething, confusion or resentment. Um, tick tock by constraining those, those guardrails is, is helping people to be less shit. There's only certain degrees of freedom that you have. And by reducing that, the, the maximum amount of shitness that your content can be has been brought down. You've got it exactly. Perfect. We've broken it. We understand it. It's always worth that, probably 50% of my obsession, which is why I'm such a big believer in this ergo-density debate, which is all about the mathematics of optimization under multiplicative dynamics, okay? Right? Okay. But a very simple way of looking at it, right? Okay.

You've got a little formula that says 1 plus 3, 1 plus 3 is 4 or 2 plus 2 or 4 plus 0, okay? Right? They all add up to 4 and you can add 1 to either the 1 or the 3. Well, it doesn't make any fucking difference, right? You can add the 1 to the 1 or you can add the one to the three and it'll now be five, all right? But under both predictive dynamics, obviously that's not the same rule, right? You add the one to the lower of the two numbers because if you take it obviously if you have four times not and you add one till to four, you still have not, right? What you want to do is add it to, let's say three times one, you want to add the one to the two, because that way you get six,

okay? Rather than say not or five or something, right? Now, the reason that makes a difference is that under multiplicative dynamics and lots and lots of things in human life are kind of more like multiplication than they are addition. It strikes me as an essential absurd assumption of economics to assume that utility is additive. Okay, that utility arises from a simple series of additive processes that net out. Strikes me as bonkers. Look at reputation, you know the joke that ends, you shag one sheet, right? Okay, we all know that joke, okay? But do they call me Demetri the Boat Builder? But do they call me Demetri the Church Builder? But do they call me Demetri the Philanthropist? You shag one sheet, right?

Now that's a series that reputation is sort of multiplicative. If you hit a big fat zero and one, nobody, nobody nets out Jimmy Savoel today. Nobody goes, yeah, binna the kitty fiddler, but on the upside, he did do a lot of work for charity. Did some great work as a philanthropist? Yeah, did some great work, you know, no, nobody nets out Jimmy Savoel, okay? Right? Okay, I'm telling you. And so, I don't know if you've got lots of things in life

that pay me more like multiplication over time than they are addition. Yeah. So I'm in Dubai and I've misplaced my passport. I fly home this Sunday. I found it this morning. But is it not stupid that I still need a physical paper object in my bag to move

between countries? I could RFID it, we could facial recognition it, I could fingerprint it. Interesting. My own favourite solution would be a weirdly British fudge, which is you can retain a physical passport for reassurance purposes, and that you probably take it with you, but you would also retain some other, you know, that in other words, passport free travel might be possible. But there is the element to the physical, if you think about it, which is one very simple level, what happens if your computer system goes down at immigration, right? Okay, so there are, you know, there are really, really, you know, simple value, but I think there's also a value to

print in kinds of ways that we don't anticipate. So I'll give you an example of this, right? If you get into a taxi in Dubai or anywhere else in the world and it says tariff, and it tells you what the prices of taxes are at different times of the day and it's not a bit of paper that's laminated and stuck behind the taxi drivers back as it were. I've got a reason about a confidence so that's the price he charges everybody because patent-ly he doesn't get out of the cab every time a new patent gets in and replace the tariff according to the expected wealth of the passenger. Okay, if you have the price to spend on a digital screen, I've got the slight and not unwarranted fear. Okay. I mean, I'll give you a lovely example of that. If you had a digital screen, how do I know he

isn't applying the Gringo Tourist tariff. Five-star hotel tariff, yeah. Well, I had that actually going to a five-star hotel in Seville. Actually, this was a paper tariff, no, actually there was no displayed tariff, I think. But suddenly this guy invents a 20-year-old supplemental arrow puerto, which I'm pretty sure didn't fucking exist, because nobody else I met had paid this thing, but he simply realized that I'm staying at this hotel. I'm almost certainly not paying for the hotel,

because I'm traveling on my own. Therefore, I'm not going to risk getting beaten up to save WPP shareholds of 20 euros. So eventually I paid his fucking supplemental heirapurto and I went into the hotel. Now, it's things like paper which which are kind of set in stone. The other thing is that you've got to remember that if you wanted to fake something in paper, you can do it, you can fake a passport, but you can't fake passports at massive scale, where there's possible some huge IT break-in would allow, you know, it would suddenly allow two million people to get fake rights to travel to the UK. This is the same argument as to why polls, why the American election still done on paper,

right? Hey, you should do it on paper. And incidentally, I think the growth of postal voting is completely unacceptable. I'm with the Donald there, because when I was a kid in the UK, you had postal voting, but it was basically confined to people serving overseas in the military. It wasn't because I was on holiday, right? Or people who are bedridden. In other words, you'd ask for a postal vote in the most exceptional circumstances. You know, I can remember driving very old people to the polling station on polling day. This is with my parents driving, when I was kind of 10 or something,

they drive people who needed a lift to the polling station, right? Now this business of A, there are all sorts of things, you can register other people. Once you've done that, if you've helped someone register to vote, if you're a member of a political party, you then enjoy something called reciprocation bias, which is given that these people filled in the paperwork for me. I feel like a bit of a twat-mont voting for them. There's the possibility of coercion within a household where the dad or someone else basically gathers up all the votes and votes collectively. Okay. There's the possibility simply of non-privacy that you could in a coercive relationship demand to see how the other person has voted. And also the possibility of fraud at scale,

which is basically Americans don't have a perfect record of that, and JFK didn't deserve to be elected in 1959, I don't think. There was a whole lot of balance stuffing in Chicago and places. I think that it's not merely essential for the process to be honest, it needs to be seen to be honest, because the real point of democracy is not that you get a consensus on what government you want. It's that people arrive a consensus around a sincere belief about what everybody else wants, right? You know, it's not a simple matter of aggregating preferences.

It's getting the effective consensus of everybody that this is the collective decision writ large. And the second you start having weird electronic things and the second you start to have postal voting, I think that disappears and I think it's highly dangerous. And we're seeing that now, right? We're seeing the fallout of that now. Yeah, so actually, oddly, although I totally, I think the results genuine, I think Biden won. I'm not necessarily just booting that. I think for the longer term, this practice of widespread postal voting

is getting a bit concerning. I agree. Also, you could argue that this is a decision, okay? Which merits a walk? Piping? Maybe it's five minutes. I'm not saying it's three hours standing in a queue and all that kind of shit goes on,

where there's effectively voter suppression and that's going to be clamped on as well. But this is a decision where I think it just merits a walk, right, to make it a bit serious. Okay, this isn't like voting for fucking X factor or cake world or don't get or whatever these flaming programs are. It's a bit more serious than that. And I think you should just get off your ass, put some clothes on and go for a fucking walk.

You want some ritual, some symbolism behind it. Pilgrimage, make a pilgrimage to the voting booth. Just to say this is slightly unusual, you know, this isn't just, I mean, you know, it's a really, really important point I think that that business of voting at home is not really the same, because have you actually thought about it? I mean, the point about the war. And this is the slight, you know, one slight downside over Zoom versus business travel, although I'm a huge Zoom advocate, is that when you travel to a meeting, you didn't have an hour to think about the meeting while you're in transit.

And sometimes now you find yourself teleported into a meeting from a different continent with like one minute to prepare. And so, you know, I mean, that's another point I'd make, which is, I just think the walk is good. I can't. You know, it says, okay, I'm going here. I'm making a tolerable degree of effort. You know, I'm not just going to basically check a box and get it over with, and I think it deserves that level of solemnity. That's what I'd say. Give me your thoughts on Dyson Airblade, Handrye's versus Paper Tels. Obviously, I quite like the Airblade. I don't know whether they've been turned off because

they're massive virus spreaders. I don't know what the effect is. They're just atomizing whatever was on your hands, aren't they? And just pushing it is particulates into the air. I think I never thought of it like that. You're absolutely right. And then you're a good job of drawing your hands in fairness. I mean, that insight that actually you use sort of vortices and highly intense airflow as the device seems to be quite good. It also strikes me as well, I really want to understand that there is a podcast about this is how you break into that bathroom market. So did they attack paper towels?

Did they attack the existing dryers? Because they installed base of the Berkeley, Illinois, World's dryer corporation. You know, those things where you can with a twisty nozzle at the front. You can also do the hair as well for some reason, yeah. Yeah, well, for the Dyson's, you can also do your genitals, if you need to dry your genitals. So, you know, it's horses for course. But you'd have to, you'd somehow have to slide in sideways. Yeah, you'd have to get inside ways, wouldn't you? But actually, funnily enough, the dice, one thing with which is a use of a hairdryer is about one time in a hundred, whether you have to give a talk and you have a minor chino accident when going

to the Louvre for for your talk, which is by the way the most frightening bit of public speaking. And I had that happen once, only once, and the dryer was totally unsuitable. No, if any wasn't even a urine-related accident, it was a wash basin-related accident where the wash basin catapulted a load of water into my groin. And I was left having to go on stage in about five minutes. And there was a glorious natural solution, which is when I came out of the Lou in a total state wondering what to do, like whether to turn my cardigan into a mini dress or something.

It actually started pouring with rain, so I simply went outside the hotel, stood in the rain for five minutes, so I was all over soaked, and then went back in again. So I got away with it. That wasn't even your in relation, I hate to do that. It was very, very fortunate from you. But that is one of the public speakers greatest fears. The final, the final urination prior to speaking, making sure that there's no dribble, making sure that there's no aggressive bathroom tap. That's why there are no dribble making sure that there's no aggressive bathroom tap. That's why there are no public speakers over 60, I suspect. That prostate's going.

What do you, what do you have views on the numbers on credit cards? Oh, I've made those fairly explicit. That's an extraordinary design failure. With one exception, actually, I'll give American, I don't want to, my car, because then someone will nick the socks off. But the exception of American Express, who now sometimes print the number in big on the back, so it's readable, okay, they have a four digit CVV, which is actually properly printed on the front, not in some blurry ink on the signature's grip. Okay. With the exception of the American Express, credit cards were never really designed for the number to be read out at all,

because when they first came out, it was the rumble strip, okay? And the fact that very few designers have rethought the design of the card, so the number is tolerably easy to read, and the CVV number doesn't basically blur off. If you've ever been in a slightly sweaty climate and you've just carried a credit card in your shirt pocket, the chance of the CVV number remaining legible is minuscule. And the shiny things wear

off a credit card so that at some occasions you have to hold it at a strange angle to a bright light, to have any chance of reading, but actually one of the weird things about design is that one of the cases where functionalism loses out to aesthetics is undoubtedly caused by the fact that most designers are twenty, I just to be clear about this, I really venerate design and designers, so I'm not having a go. But most designers are 27 years old and they're working with something like a 38-inch 4K monitor on their desk. And what looks good on that is not necessarily readable in the real world because, you know, I mean, okay, I mean, I actually have to leave this pair of reading glasses on my desk at all times,

because if I need to read a credit card number, if I need to read a ready meal, ready meal recipe instructions, you know, cooking instructions are unbelievably bad. I mean, as I said on Twitter, I think you need an arch light at the John Droll bank telescope to have a chance to actually reading them and you know and so these little things about usability in everyday life the Don Norman it you know to be honest I vote for Don Norman he's still alive in the about 80 but I vote for Don Norman for President because I think a four-year term where the government was entirely dedicated to improving the design of every day of every day activities and every day things would

have been something that's Denmark isn't it? The great thing about those Scandinavian countries, I mean, thinking about the climate shit, you know, there are too many fucking trees, but the one upside is that everything is thought out you know Copenhagen Airport you don't have a single moment of anxiety or confusion you know and i i i think that's why they're so happy with large degrees of socialism really which is you don't mind paying a lot for government services if they're really competent. Fair point. Talib says that social science is a bollocks and unfalseifiable and yet your career is being built on behavioral psychology insights and yet you two are good friends. How's that work?

I think social science is an area of inquiry, not an area of thought laying down rules, okay? The value I see to social science is largely that by having a far wider, a far wider, how would I describe it, dammit of possible causal explanations for behavior. If you think about economics has this one which it calls utility and then you say what's utility and they say it's the thing that people try to maximize and you say what are people trying to maximize their own expected utility and you go well hold on that's completely circular logic you must all just say people do what people do. Okay, now but actually trying to understand both in the lens of complexity theory and with a wider conception of human motivation, trying to understand why people do the things they

do, the most valuable contribution of social science will never be the contribution of laws like physics. I'm always pleased there's a replication crisis because I said you'd never expect this shit to replicate all the time anyway. I've been business long enough to know that something that works in one context doesn't work in another, right? But you increase the solution space in orderly if you allow a greater range of possible explanations into your model of human behaviour. And I'd argue that it's actually a Matt Ridley tell me that biology, someone said, is the science of exceptions. I don't think social science is fine if you treat it as a science of exceptions.

Everybody thinks that, but maybe an eight so, okay? And also, it's a science of high levels of ambiguity, by the way, because in one context, people will do one thing in a slightly different context, they'll behave completely differently. And understanding that is just science in terms of a form of inquiry and also science, which is non-normative. Because what talent gets denied with it,

saying economic logic tells, says people should do this, a lot of people are doing that, therefore the people are wrong and we should nudge them to a point where they become more consistent with economic theory. Okay, that's what gets talent angry. My view to be absolutely honest is mostly the opposite, which is if people mostly do X after a billion years or serve evolution, an economic stink station should be doing Y, it's highly likely there's something wrong with economics. As John Kay, who is himself an economist, says, you know, it's highly unlikely that the human approach to, for example, risk, or the human approach to erudicity and decision making.

So, in case it's highly likely we would have evolved to a state where we got it a bit nearly right, but not quite right. See, if everybody involved with one leg shorter than the other, right, the idea that they're these persistent irrationalities and that you continue to def define them as irrationalities is too comfortable an assumption. You're giving your model far too much credence if you start blaming the person before you start blaming the model. I like it. So I have this discussion, very simple discussion, which is how do you get younger people to take out pensions? which is how do you get younger people to take out pensions? And I said, yeah, there are loads of ways you can get younger people to save more. And I said, A, probably don't call it a pension, because they're associated with, you know,

someone actually they're associated with a 55-year-old, they're associated with a 70-year-old, right? But B, when young people, if you want to depend to a pension, the first amount has to be recoverable. You don't know enough about the future to say, well, that money, I won't be needing that until I'm 55. No one aged 23 can say that, okay? Christ knows what can happen, you know, I know nothing could happen. But the second thing I said is I said, yeah, you can definitely improve the rate to which young people save in pensions. And that's the second thing I said is but never expect the amount of young people save in pensions to amount the economists think

they should save in pensions. And they said, why is that? I said, because when you're 27, finding a high quality life partner is probably more important than saving for retirement. And I said, I'm willing to bet if you go on Tinder, okay, there's nobody under 50 on Tinder talking about their pension, right? The people over 50 talking about their pension on Tinder. Well, I would guess if you're 70 and you're trying to pull a 58 year old, it might be. You put your pension in your bio. Yeah, you might put your, I know clear. I'm like, you know, I got married before the stuff came along.

Yeah. But you might, you know, I don't know if you're, you know, if you're trying to pull a spring chicken of 62 and you were 71, maybe you want to talk about it. I got a really interesting insight from Rob Henderson on this show. He taught me a few very, very fun things about Tinder. First thing being that you can 10X your popularity on Tinder

in terms of rightswipes by putting a master's level education as opposed to a bachelor's level education in your bio, if you're a man. And the 80-20 per-ito principle also works on Tinder. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 20% of women and the top 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. That's out of a dataomics, which was a data science analysis done of dating trends. It's a horrible thing to say, but most of a lot of what is nasty in society, like excessive consumerism and excessive spend on luxury

goods and signaling, could probably be reduced if women were actually less selective about who they're slapping. Sadly, look, girls just drop the standards a little bit and everything will be fine. Right. Right, we're going to play Rory, we're going to play a game. We're going to play a game. And that's his argued. This was a pretty rich guy. He said, apart from the very funny joke

when somebody asked a Russian, what would have happened if Mr. Krushchev had been shot instead of Mr. Kennedy, and the Russian replied, I don't think Aristotle and that's this would have married Mrs. Krushchev. Apart of that joke, that is actually said, he said, if there were no women in the world, all the money would be worthless. And so there's, there's elements, so it's totally 80-20 that you said that essentially the 80% of least desirable men are competing for the 20% of least desirable women. Yeah, and then the converse as well, which is just, I mean, hypergamy's a hell of a drug. That's incredibly extreme, but it's plausible, it's totally plausible. The other thing is, but masters degree pays off for men but not for women.

Yeah, because women are signalling off. They, very few women want to date a man who is not richer than them and, sorry, or not more educated than them. They'll take a man who's perhaps not as rich as them if he's incredibly clever. And that's presumably working on a trajectory. Being a hedge fund manager married to a university professor, a female hedge fund manager married to male university professor, or novelist, if he's reasonably successful,

you know, an intolerably successful, or artist would be okay, okay? Whereas it'd be much more difficult if you were doing a less, it's got to be some degree of scarcity signalling. And actually the extent to which we use the educational system to signal our possession of scarce resources is one of the biggest grotesque areas in 21st century life. So the university that higher education has become a luxury goods industry, essentially. It's prada, you know, it's Ferrari, it's horrible.

I know that seems weird, but when I went to university, I saw it as something to do because I was quite interested in shit. I genuinely said it's okay, and this is a Cambridge University in 1987. No one discussed what job they wanted to do into the third year. The third year, beginning of the third year, you actually had to put it into some applications for shit. Nobody discussed that shit at all, yeah, one and two. Nobody was talking about, I didn't know, if someone had said, I want to work in banking, I go, why do you want to sit behind a glass screen with a fucking pen on a chain, right? This is less than a lifetime ago, okay? Now, okay, you know, we

acknowledged the fact that if you went to Oxbridge or you went to a Russell Group University, your employment, you thought that your chances of being unemployed were quite low. That was certainly true in the late 80s, but there wasn't this hyper competition that was going on. Nobody said, you know, an M feel is the new, you know, is the new BA or that. It's a pulling strategy. That's all it is. It's just a dating strategy. Get your evidence up, up your Tinder rating. Fine. Yes. This is kind of scary, isn't it? Yeah. Right. We're going to play. We're going to play.

And then bothered that much about the educational level of women to the same extent. So it doesn't, or the earning power. It doesn't look that way. No. A man, the problem is, right, that women are the gatekeepers to sex. Men are always going to be the sexual protagonists.

And given that, for the most part, we all have that friend who would take whatever he can get. And I think that that kind of shows out in more than just physical characteristics as well. Plus, there's a classic dynamic of resource acquisition and kind of resource giver from the male side, right? It's very rare to find a man who wants, despite what my Instagram bio says, not many men want to be a trophy husband. It just seems emasculating and all the rest of it. We're going to play a game. We're going to play a game called Bull or Bear.

And I'm going to give you some different things and you're going to tell me whether you abolish your bearish about it and a little bit of an explanation why. Fabulous. QR code menus. What for track and trace or for reading the menu? For being in a restaurant, QR code menus. What for track and trace or for reading the menu for being in a restaurant, QR code menus. There, there, good. As absolutely unnecessary level of complexity,

and means what restaurant has ever given you a menu that's two inches wide or inches deep, the fact say. It's all the rage and to buy out here. And there's a number of different ways. Do you have it in a single feed, like an infinite scroll thing? Do you have it across multiple tabs? Do you have photos of the food?

If you have photos of the food, you've got to scroll for longer. Do you allow people to order on the browser? Do you allow, do you have to wave the waiter over? It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, do you allow, do you have to wave the waiter over? It's very, very tough. It's one thing that's about it. One, there is a heuristic that only fast food joints have photographs of food, for some reason.

Now, logically, you'd always have photographs of food on the menu to prevent you ordering something that you hated the look of when it arrived. But there's a heuristic that menus a text you'll in upmarket joints. It's okay for care. So you have a photo, it's okay for McDonald's to have a photo, but you don't do that the man wire cap says on right there.

So the QR code menu would allow you to look at photographs. I would also argue that you might. But then once you get a large group of people, this doesn't really work. The QR code menu and a large group of people is going to be claiming disaster because all it takes is one person to be technologically incompetent the whole process of ordering. You've got a big bottle neck there. Right next, next ball or bear, next, next ball or bear, sex robots. Um, that comes with me slightly in the

category of things like anti-masking, which I don't fully understand. But I think to some degree one has to be short-term. I think the best diffusion curves are going to reach us a ceiling fairly low. Because part of the thing is, where do I put the thing? My cleaning lady is in my mind, right? Right? OK. Unless someone invents some really clever way in which, right?

My cleaning lady is pretty tolerant. I occasionally walk around the place of my underpants, but I think she'd draw the line in a sex row. Well, that was the advantage of the flashlight, wasn't it, that the flashlight could be hidden away as a flashlight. That was the whole point of it. But, shy of being able to tumble your sex doll up into a suitcase, which also, if your cleaning lady finds, is going to cause more downstream complications. Yeah, I mean grief, you know, no, I'm going to say I'm bullish, but I don't think I think it's going to reach nascent totes of market penetration, which is an awful word to use

in the context, you know, at around the kind of 10, 10, 15 percent level. I don't think I don't think I'll ever have a sex robot. Well, I've never never said that, but it strikes me as slightly implausible. Okay. Next one, smoking and vaping. Long-term bearish on smoking, bullish on vaping, I think. One of my most heinous views is I think there are benefits to nicotine, mental and other benefits, which we will eventually acknowledge if people stop being quite so kind of manakian about everything. It isn't the nicotine that's harmful about smoking, it's the other shit. That's what's unusual.

In alcohol, it's the alcohol that's the problem. The bit that gives you the fun is also the problem. In smoking, the bit that gives you the whatever mental capacity it is, isn't the thing that does most of the harm. Got you. Fast fashion. I'm actually very bullish on nicotine. Yeah, bullish on nicotine overall, it's the delivery mechanism that's the problem. Yeah.

So fast fashion, basically, will it become unfashionable to wear fast fashion because it kills polar bears and sweatshop workers or does it not matter when its four pounds are skirt? I hate to say this but the tragedy of fast fashion is that this is the tragedy of fast fashion. that this is the tragedy of fast-facinac. Logical mid-market fashion, what you might call market and the spend says clothing or Yagas just gone into administration. That's pretty up market, but it's mid-market, up market, mid-market. The problem they have is you get an endorphin rush from a bargain and you get an endorphin rush from an extravagance, but you don't get an endorphin rush from mid-market retail. So I always have this problem that something I can wear once the cost of tenor,

I'm getting quite a lot of kick for not much money, right? You know, if you go on, I'm not as a pastime, I've started by things from ASOS. Now I don't treat them as fast fashion, but I've started by things like trousers, because no one cares about trousers, for whatever reason. It's the worst area for other than jeans, where some people buy those really weird things with a bad pattern on the ass, okay, other than sort of, and I don't know any denim. I'm a turtle denim denier. Very bare-ish denim. I don't know, but I'm not bare-ish, it seems to me, it's very Lindy, as Taleb would say, deady. It's very romantic, and it's survived a hell of a lot of changes in fashion.

I just don't understand it as a fabric. Why would I wear an uncomfortable fabric that's not, you know, that fades unpleasant? What's the trouser of choice then? Is it sort of more of a chino, like a comfortable chino material? Yeah, as you get older, of course, the elastic waistband suddenly arises extraordinary pill. But I mean, of course, under video conferencing conditions, our freedom in the trouser department has gone up massively because I've got a theory that if women didn't exist, and if social convention didn't exist, most British men would wear shorts every day.

That's my life. That's what my life is like, because I'm not accountable to people for the way that I dress. Right, final one, only fans, Bologna. I don't know, only fans. So it's the direct to consumer adult actress or actor platform, which is blowing up quite a lot in America at the moment. So it's decentralized,

the earning potential for either amateur or professional actors and actresses. I'm not sure if you've seen this. If you haven't, then've just introduced you to only fun. I've just had a little film industry. Kind of. It's a little bit like, it's a little bit like Patreon, but it's for people that do pony stuff. Very interesting. You haven't seen that guy from Bolton who rings up the woman on babe, whatever it is, his babe cab.

I've been seeing you on a biskits you drinking. What biskits you eat? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have, I not even really funny. I love that kind of context. I once went, I was a student, I went and see a Manuel at the local cinema around the corner because it was on at 10 o'clock at night. We were all very bored.

My friend, who's a massive civil aviation fan, you may remember that in Manuel has sex on the plane as she flies out to, well, hell is it? It's somewhere inside of these days, isn't it? And my friend was absolutely incensed because he said it's completely the wrong sound effect for a Boeing 747. Okay. So for as long as these actors and actresses can keep the quality of it. Well, I really enjoy the bit of porn. I don't like porn actually very much. I mean, I can't come that I don't watch it ever because that would be ridiculous. Everybody's had a look, right? But I find the bits of porn where no sex is taking place, vaguely interesting because

here you can see the mental workings of someone who has to contrive a backstory, okay? And that's narrative and it's interesting. The actual act itself is actually unbelievably repetitive and tedious. What you'll be like watching, it would be exactly the same as getting

Cristiana Ronaldo and saying, right mate, before you go out to play football, what I really want to see you do is have a crack at this particular orchestral piece on the violin and then bake me a cake. And I'm going to watch you try and do both of those things. And then you can go and crack on with the stuff that you're capable at. The only is, obviously, good news because it reduces the problem. I'd love to know more about the economics of the adult entertainment industry, as I think

they call themselves, but it's obviously they were, if you think about it, they were advanced in terms of payment mechanisms online. They were huge advanced in terms of online video streaming, and now what this is is effectively, they were online advanced in terms of video conferencing, okay. So they generally discover technology is about 10 years before businesses do. This decentralized nature is absolutely insane. I had both a porn star who has been long time in the adult industry and now gone to this decentralized model and also a girl who started the UK's version of OnlyFans

and generated 10 million pounds of revenue in 16 months. So this particular model is, there's a lot to be said about it, but yeah, I will, I'll send you, I'll send you some very PC links where you can have a look at some, some data that I've got about that. Next thing. It is, I'm, in fact, good because it prevents the Carusa effect. Well, there's never been... Carusa effect.

The Carusa effect is what happened. So before the grab a phone came along, okay? Well, there's different results. The Caruso effect is what happened. So before the gramophone came along, you could make a reasonable living as the fifth best operatic tenor in Denmark. Because there were enough opera houses for you to know. And occasionally the best two operatic tenors were engaged or ill or went down with a cold.

And you got to sing a bit. And you can actually survive. Caruso came along. It's a winner takes all the fact for the gramophone, okay? Everybody wanted Caruso, not necessarily because he was the best person of the time, but 17 because he was the most famous. So you get these Matthew effects, positive feedback effects. So Caruso ends up a millionaire and the fifth best operatic tenor in Denmark loses his job effectively. So sweeping the street. So there is something really, really interesting because the lose owns a million air and the fifth best operatic tenor in Denmark loses his job. So there is something really, really interesting because the same thing, not only in poor,

the same thing will happen in the public speaking industry. How will it go? Will you have a carousel effect? Where basically if you're Tony Blair, you get a million quid to appear on Zoom and if you're me, you get two Papers, fifty seven, you know, or will it go the opposite way, which is only fans, where I'm supported in my retirement on Patreon, occasionally appearing and talking to people

about behavioral science. Now, I'll tell you one really important thing, by the way, in terms of, this is the most Zoom is as important as the internet, in terms of economic effects, okay? Both good and bad, and they'll be complex. But I really believe that. And I've tell you one very simple reason why the washing machine was possibly more important than the internet because it allowed women to enter the workforce. Okay, when you took away the drudgery of maintaining a middle-class home,

it massively increased the number of people who could enter the workforce. The only reason I think most people retire from white collar jobs is because increased the number of people who could enter their workforce. The only reason I think most people retire from white collar jobs is because they're sick of commuting, it's not because they're sick of work. I'm an accountant, it's implausible as it may seem, really like doing a candidacy, right? Because they're good at it. And actually, a 63-year-old accountant's probably pretty damn good, right? Okay?

The only reason they retire is because they don't like work, but the opportunity cost of work, which is if you have to be in a specific place in a specific time and you have to travel to get there, that price is too high. It's not the time you spend working. It's the fact that you can't retire to the south of France, you can't go on a golfing holiday and, you know, march when the flights are cheap. It's all that shit that causes people to retire. It's not the fact they don't like work. What's the biggest lesson that you've learned from observing 2020? Um...

Oh, I'm doubting network effects. The fact that in order for Zoom, which is when you think about it, blinding me fucking obvious as a business technology, the fact that it took everybody to be forced to use it at the same time before its value became apparent shows actually an extraordinary lack of vision in our adoption of technology. So in my defense, I'd mandated Zoom Fridays, my team, before the pandemic even hit, because I said, look, this is a synchronous technology. Therefore, we all have to get to stay home on the same day of the week in order to make use of it. And a year and a half ago, we'd started discovering really weird things like,

you can win business over Zoom easy. Can't win business over email. You've got to have a meeting. Okay. But over Zoom, you can actually pick up business. You can you can deliver business over zoom. Obviously you can't deliver. No one's going to pay you five-figure sum to write a deck and then email it to them, right? Okay. So the previous world you'd have to fly. Now you know that makes you a kind of joint venture with British airways. If you're clients, if you're my age you're not very keen on going in economy and the client's on another continent, that essentially means that half your profits going in travel costs, it were. And so there's something very, very interesting about this.

And also because business exchange, there was no normal mode, other than going to the pub after a meeting or going out from meal. There was no informal means of business to business communication. Okay. So businesses themselves were optimized around coffee shops and corridors where you had a blackboard so people could enjoy Seren Deppas encounters. When you look at B2B communication, it was either incredibly cold in textual. It was like email or a text message or a power-up on deck or a spreadsheet more likely. Or it was face-to-face, which was hugely expensive and time-consuming, and you could only face doing three of those a week.

And what it was like having a weird world where you had limousines and you had buses, but you had nothing in between. You're not a mean. You didn't have private cars. And this, the fact that business communication has become, my volume of email has halved. And most of my email now is just about arranging Zoom calls. And Marshall McClellan must say Zoom is a warm or hot form of communication, whereas other than face-to-face, all the other business forms of communication were cold. So this actually, I find it much better, because you can actually go off an attention on a zoom call. It makes things much less left-brained. I think it's a huge gift.

Good. Boris calls you up tomorrow and says, Rory, mate, I'm struggling here, behaviorally, how can we improve the public's view of COVID restrictions? What do you say? I don't know yet, and I'm still puzzling, because I think it's possible to keep the disease in a bans with some very simple, heuristic rules, which obey. They need to be visible in their breaking,

so it needs to be visible when people break them, okay. What's that mean? What like? I don't, I'm generally pro-master wearing on the grounds that it seems to make sense. And I also believe the theory of Monica Gandhi that there's a certain variation effect to mask wearing, which is if you become mind-ally infected with a small dose of COVID, the likely outcome is, if you become mindfully infected

with a small dose of COVID, the likely outcome is not that you become severely ill, it's that you become immune with minor effects. So I think masks work twice, not just by preventing infection, but by reducing the initial dose. But bear in mind, this is not a universally held belief, and I'll probably get kicked off Twitter if I say it,

I'm not sure. But I genuinely believe I think there might be a double win in that respect. I also think Marx benefit other people as well as you. So there's a double win in that sense. So if you look at those dimensions, Marx might be working in eight different ways rather than just one. And by doing that, it's quite obvious when someone breaks it, right? My neighbour in Fulham, her next upstairs neighbour, the flat above, basically held a party for eight people the night before last. Now here's an awkward thing in a country like Britain, what do you do? You don't dumb on your neighbour, okay? This is like East Germany, and even she who doesn't like her name very much goes,

okay, my relationship will be impossible if I were known to a dog dog by neighbor and run the police. So you need some degree of voluntary compliance and among the young that's disproportionately difficult because they don't, you know, they don't really perceive much risk. And I don't know quite what to do there, but I think it'll be possible to close certain mass events and to have some sort of, we don't know the extent to which private parties are actually causing the hotspots, and I think it might be quite high. So maybe what you want to do is get people out, there's actually banned parties at home and open pubs under, under stringent conditions or create outdoor spaces. It looks like the

rate of outdoor transmission is pretty tiny to be honest. There are also things about ventilation which nobody is investigating. There are also things about sprays and ultraviolet light which nobody seems to have investigated. So I think the mask is important because it acts at the bottleneck of transmission, okay, which is the mouth and nose. We don't seem to have the level of contact-based transmission that people anticipated, either, do we? And both, I mean, we would have noticed if postmen had started getting very ill or something like that. But I, it's a really interesting question. I think we should look at ventilation, I think we should look at sprays and virus sites and also air filters indoors. And we should also look at, you know, obviously masks ventilation and ultraviolet light and other, other, virus-sideal things. So not just the mask, it seems a bit weird that we focus purely on hand washing and masks

and having an investigating, you know, sprays which can kill viruses quite effectively. What else? I mean, I'm a bit sympathetic with the government. The reason for that is the only people who seem to know exactly what we should have done are all working in journalism. Journalists seem to have a ludicrous idea about how simple this is and how, you know, it was obvious we should have locked down early. Actually, it looked like the rate of infection was already falling before lockdown was imposed

simply because of voluntary measures for instance. And in London in places the absence of tourism you see would have been highly significant. So I mean you know it's incredibly difficult. What the show is that what the show is in total is that we are used to the pretence of knowing what we're doing okay. Now I don't think we know what we're doing most of the time but most of the time we have a discipline like economics, which allows us to pretend we know what's going on. And so we can post-rationalize lots of outcomes. And that allows the kind of scientific brigade to become overconfident. This is genuinely a case where we will know in about two years' time what we should have

done. In defense of any government, I mean the Belgian government, the French government, the Irish government, right, there may be things like Germany had a very bad flu season, okay. The UK didn't. Now those things can actually affect susceptibility going forward. So we look at the Germans and we naturally assume that's because of, you know, it's like racism actually, because they're highly competent. But the Austrian similarly had, you know, very, very, like Switzerland weirdly has now become very severe in the second wave, okay. So first of all, we often make total generalizations about countries and based on national stereotypes,

you know, where we, I mean, actually, I think Greece had a very like COVID thing, but Greece is incredibly bright people, but nobody ever says we should look at the Greek model, okay, because that's just not what we do. Very, very good menics, actually, generally. So one of the interesting things is that there's a lot of national stereotyping going on, and there's a lot of generalization going on. We're typically looking at things at a national level, which may not even be the helpful way to look at things at all, maybe we should have localized more. But I just want to know, if anyone has got a solution to that fact of how you stop your

neighbour having a younger neighbour having a party under lockdown without dobbling them to the cops, strike me is a really interesting question. Now in the first phase of lockdown you can do that because simple social stigma would be enough. But that's getting increasingly difficult. And I genuinely don't, I mean, my view is that, you know, at some point we'll know what we should have done probably. It might even be a year and a half, two years. Because there really were things,

why Switzerland having a big second wave suddenly, you notice huge discrepancy between say, a man in the United Arab Emirates. Yeah, a certain, certain country, New Zealand, of course, had the benefit of getting it laid. And it's a bloody island in the middle of nowhere. So we're going, isn't the New Zealand government brilliant? Well, yeah, they are brilliant, okay? They did it very well, but they had opportunities

which other people didn't. So it's kind of, you know, it's kind of complex. The other thing, by the way, is that if you lock down, it's worth remembering that if you lock down too soon and people don't have enough time to prepare for it, you end up with a lot of people breaking the rules, right? You know, if you basically said, right, we're locking down at midnight tonight, you would have ended up with Mayhem on the roads with everybody who is at their London place trying to get to their holiday home,

everybody who is separated from their spouse trying to get back home. You know, so at some point, you have to actually have a delay for behavioral reasons, not for epidemiological reasons. So this shit is not fucking easy because you're at the intersection between ethics. I mean, I think we should have done more deliberate infection experiments actually on the young. Not, not, I mean, not in the very early stages, but I don't, you know, I think some, some challenge trials,

you know, a few months ago would have made sense, actually, to understand more about the, because we know, because it's asymptomatic for the early stages, we know very little about the early stages of development, and what separates out an illness with severe outcomes, to an illness with trivial outcomes. Why do you think people are prepared to pay 10 times or 100 times the price of a book for a course on the same subject? I've been fascinated by this recently, so a lot of internet entrepreneurs are creating a course of how to have the perfect this or how to do your, how to do how to do how to

do have it setting and goal settings are very popular online course, where people are prepared to charge 100,, £200, £300 and add a community on the side, and yet you can get atomic habits by James Clea for a tenor. It's a bit of an espresso effect, I suspect, because when you frame something in the field of education, I can remember at work occasionally, I'd buy a book for the team of a behavioral science book and I claim it out of the training budget and that was considered actually a bit of, well, you know, I'm not sure you can do that. I said, it's a book, it's fucking training, right?

Why is it okay to claim for some person to come in and talk to us all, but it's not okay to buy everybody a book? Potentially from the person who was giving the talk even. And yeah, absolutely, and there'll be more in there. But it's not like when I wrote, as far as I know, when I wrote my book, I was not aware of saying, well, I'm going to hold back on these five things because they're far more monetizable if I give a talk or a training course. It's not like you hold back in your book. You give everything. You put everything into your book. You possibly can and hope it's enough to warrant the length, which it really is. I mean, a hell of a lot of books, to be honest, tail off towards the end, you know, there's a bit of barrel scraping going on to get it

across the 80,000 word mark, right? But yeah, I've never understood that, to be absolutely honest. Have you noticed it? Do you know the particular sort of effect I'm talking about? Synchronicity has a value. The fact that we're doing something along with other people seems to have a value that we have portioned some emotional value to. The fact that we're doing something with other people. The part of it is that the Richard Thaler experiment about beer. You know what I mean? Where he said, you're on a beach, you've been parched, you were there met, very famous experiment in behavioral science. And you're on a beach, you're getting pretty thirsty because you've been on a hot beach for the

last three hours. And your mate says, okay, I've noticed a place along the beach that sells chilled bottles of Heineken, right? Okay, tell me how much you're willing to pay for a bottle of refrigerated Heineken and if the price is below your maximum willingness to pay, okay? I'll buy your bottle and bring it back, right? Now, the point about the along the beach is that you're not enjoying the ambience of the place selling it. If you say, Shaq, selling chilled Heineken, this is in the 1990s or earlier, only about maybe the 80s. People are willing to pay something like $1.59 for a bottle of couture beer. If you describe the places of boutique hotel, they actually were prepared to pay $2.40 or something like

this. Bear in mind, you've got to adjust for inflation. So it's like $5 or $2.80 or something like that, you know. Now what's weird about that, the utility they drive for the consumption of the beer, which is the branded beer and refrigerating both cases is identical. But they accept that given the overheads of a boutique hotel relative to the overheads of a shack, you should be prepared to pay more. So there may be a degree of labor component to it, which is, look, we all know that the marginal cost of a book is zero. Whereas, okay, this course is actually involving effort on your path and is taking up your time. So my thought on it, the reason that I propose people are prepared to pay so much more ten times or a hundred times the price of a book for a course that achieves the same thing

is that people are concerned with outcomes rather than rather than they are with the process of going through it. If you were to tell me or tell anyone, the way I say is the course gives you a bit of paper that says you completed the course. No, more that because you can't put on your CV. I read, I read Alchemy. No, it's more that what people read specifically in the self-development on non-fiction world, the reason they read partly is for the enjoyment of reading the book, but more so for the outcome and the new life that they think they're going to be able to achieve with the insights from Rory Sutherland's Alchemy or James Clears atomic Habits. And by taking the course, what I think that they presume they're going to achieve is more

likely, more compliant, more effective outcomes. So you're paying for the new world that you're going to enter. And the presumption is that by taking the course, your outcomes are more assured. Is that because I mean, it might be that you're paying for the course as a commitment device. Perhaps, yeah, constantly, which is that you really will fill it. I mean, because I was talking about this with Gusto, which is that we there's the casting example I give is my financial advisor. You know, I pay him a whole shed load of cash for stuff I could theoretically do myself,

but I'm realistic enough to know that I probably won't do it left to my own devices. If you my wife starts talking about my pension, I'm basically going to a knock-electric coma, okay, out of sheer tedium after about five seconds. Whereas if this bloke comes round and I pay him a shed load of cash, I feel I really do have to act on what he's done. So we might be actually spending the money to signal to ourselves. That might be another part of it as well. Last thing, last question, Rory, you say to be brilliant, you have to be irrational. What's that mean? Oh, that nearly all really, just to give an example for the field of entrepreneurialism,

nearly all disproportionate successful businesses are disproportionately successful, successful businesses are disproportionately successful, not despite of but because of some seemingly irrational or nonsensical component in their offering. So the argument would be that most people have a post rationalised sense making narrative of how a business works and what's important, which is almost certainly wrong in some dimensions. And so, the example I always give the most extreme case of this is Dyson, okay. And I admit this of myself, that if James Dyson had come to me in the 1980s or 1990s, and it said, I think there's a market for a 700 pound vacuum cleaner. Okay.

I want to say, well, let's have a look at the market. Shall we end up in a market scoping? And let's do a bit of market research. And if I'd asked people, would you pay 700 pounds for a vacuum cleaner? Answers would have varied between, I don't think so to fuck off. And if I'd looked at the existing vacuum cleaner market, I would have seen that Miele was, it was a grudge purchase, it was a distress purchase. Nobody enjoyed buying a vacuum cleaner market. I would have seen that Miele was, but it was a grudge purchase. It was a distress purchase. Nobody enjoyed buying a vacuum cleaner. You know, you had a Miele around 250 quid. You probably had a Henry at around 80 or 100 or 110 or whatever they are.

You maybe the Miele stretched to 300, but you basically go, okay, Jim, look, mate, don't give up the day job. And then if James had turned back to you and said, but wait, you haven't heard about my 400 pound hair dryer, you would have had him escorted out of the building, okay? And so what I'm saying is that conventional marketing approaches probably encourage us to produce products that are kind of okay. But the point is people have already solved, people are not interested in okay because they've already solved the problems that OK solves. What they haven't solved is the problems that weird solves. And so, you know, the Uber map is an example of what I call psychologic.

It's ingenious, because it doesn't increase the speed at which your car turns up, but it massively reduces the pain we experience in uncertainty while waiting for it to arrive. And I think there are huge things you can do, huge things you can do, which will effectively make it possible. We don't have metrics for the human emotions. And so we're trying to improve human emotional state by optimizing things which don't really correlate neatly at all. You know, we're trying to optimize speed and time and cost and distance and all these things that HS2 Right, we're trying to optimize an engineering problem as though we'll solve a human emotional problem or behavioral problem

But we don't have metrics for the things that matter. We don't have a metric for uncertainty. We're not even measuring with high speed to the end to end journey, right? Because I've made the point repeatedly that you could increasingly, enormously, reduce the journey time from London to Manchester, not by actually making the train faster, but by having a service where if I've booked a pre-book ticket to Manchester and there are empty seats on the train 20 and 40 minutes beforehand, I can book one of the earlier tickets, right? If you let me do that, okay, you can reduce the journey time to Manchester and increase capacity because it's better yield management, it's better load balancing of journeys. If you allow people to go early, don't let people go later, if you miss your train, stuff, stuff it, you can pay more.

A lot, you pay full fare. But if you said actually that, you know, there are 50 empty seats in first class on the train that leaves 40 minutes before your train. If you pay us a five, you can jump on one of those, right? Virgin makes money. I save journey time hanging around Burger King for 40 minutes at Houston. Everybody

wins, costs 500,000 to develop the app. Instead, they're spending 60 billion on the sunny trains, because they're measuring the wrong bloody things. I like the time on the train. Most Mancunians don't want high speed too, because they're fine with things as they are. And the reason is that most people don't travel to London often enough, that a, you know, a, let's say, I sort of, I don't know what it is, I guess, a 40% reduction in early time or a 30% reduction in early time just doesn't make that much fucking difference. The point that you made about Uber, it's one that I've heard you make before. Have you heard of T leo anticipation? Now, Teliot is as in Tiliot logical. Yes, correct.

So it's gold based anticipation and we won't be finding it painful, do we? Yeah. So very much as you know about the way that Uber works or the way that Disney Landworks, what they say, 10 minutes from this point, five minutes from this point, it's not necessarily about the weight, it's about the ability to anticipate, but Tiliot anticipation was a term coined by Hans Volkart Ulmer to describe our knowledge of how an eventual endpoint influences the entirety of the

experience. And he used endurance sports as the medium. So research is in the field of probed what happens when you hide the finish line, surreptitiously move it or take it away entirely. So there's this very famous backyard race, which you might be familiar with where they have to run 4.16 miles every hour, which is like 100, 100 miles per 24 hours. But the point is that they just keep going until everybody stops, until the last person is standing. So there's no end to this endurance event event they just run this loop and run this loop and run this loop. Is that what's running over rory? Is that your next goal? I think that is, so there's probably someone panic. That's fine. But if you think about it, we knew about that tele-anticipation thing.

If you look at that photograph of Bob Dylan waiting for the outferry in, yeah. I need to have the next call okay Rory see you later a long side the car okay I'll leave you I better leave you now I'm sorry about this no worries see you later Rory thank you brother bye you